My last post and talking about what quality software is reminded me of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

Here is an excerpt from chapter 18:

Phædrus wrote, with some beginning awareness that he was involved in a strange kind of intellectual suicide, “Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it’s been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words — .We have proved that quality, though undefined, exists. Its existence can be seen empirically in the classroom, and can be demonstrated logically by showing that a world without it cannot exist as we know it. What remains to be seen, the thing to be analyzed, is not quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called `squareness’ that sometimes prevent us from seeing it.”